Parfit On What Matters Ebook3000
2013 224 Pages ISBN: PDF 1 MB We normally take it for granted that other people will live on after we ourselves have died. Even if we do not believe in a personal afterlife in which we survive our own deaths, we assume that there will be a 'collective afterlife' in which humanity survives long after we are gone. Samuel Scheffler maintains that this assumption plays a surprising - indeed astonishing - role in our lives. In certain important respects, the future existence of people who are as yet unborn matters more to us than our own continued existence and the continued existence of those we love. Without the expectation that humanity has a future, many of the things that now matter to us would cease to do so.
By contrast, the prospect of our own deaths does little to undermine our confidence in the value of our activities. Despite the terror we may feel when contemplating our deaths, then, the prospect of humanity's imminent extinction would pose a far greater threat to our ability to lead value-laden lives: lives structured by wholehearted engagement in valued activities and pursuits. This conclusion complicates widespread assumptions about human egoism and individualism. And it has striking implications for the way we think about climate change, nuclear proliferation, and other urgent threats to humanity's survival. Scheffler adds that, although we are not unreasonable to fear death, personal immortality, like the imminent extinction of humanity, would also undermine our confidence in the values we hold dear.
Derek Parfit presents the third volume of On What Matters, his landmark work of moral philosophy. Parfit develops further his influential treatment of reasons, normativity, the meaning of moral discourse, and the status of morality. He engages with his critics, and shows the way to resolution of their differences.This volume is. Enter the characters you see below. Sorry, we just need to make sure you're not a robot. For best results, please make sure your browser is accepting cookies. By Derek Parfit 31 December 2007 In my book Reasons and Persons, I defended one view about the metaphysics of persons, and also.
His arresting conclusion is that, in order for us to lead value-laden lives, what is necessary is that we ourselves should die and that others should live. Scheffler's position is discussed with insight and imagination by four distinguished commentators - Harry Frankfurt, Niko Kolodny, Seana Shiffrin, and Susan Wolf - and Scheffler adds a final reply.
'This is some of the most interesting and best-written philosophy I have read in a long time. Scheffler's book is utterly original in its fundamental conception, brilliant in its analysis and argument, and concise and at times beautiful in its formulation.' Stephen Darwall, Yale University '[Scheffler's] discussion of the issues with which he has concerned himself is fresh and original. Moreover, so far as I am aware, those issues are themselves pretty much original with him. He seems really to have raised, within a rigorously philosophical context, some new questions.
At least, so far as I know, no one before has attempted to deal with those questions so systematically. So it appears that he has effectively opened up a new and promising field of philosophical inquiry. Not bad going, in a discipline to which many of the very best minds have already devoted themselves for close to three thousand years.' -Harry Frankfurt, Princeton University, from 'How the Afterlife Matters' (in this volume)' 'A truly wonderful and very important book.' - Derek Parfit, Emeritus Fellow, All Souls College, University of Oxford Download.
Books On What Matters by Derek Parfit James Alexander ponders Derek Parfit’s new work. Most philosophers begin like mathematicians and end like historians: they begin intensively and end extensively. Sometimes their prose style improves: sometimes it worsens. Either way, there is usually some sacrifice of depth for breadth, of severity for generosity: old ideas, stones thrown into the water when young, are now seen to create ripples out across entire oceans. Philosophy, one hopes, is such that a philosopher may begin anywhere; but they should end by discussing the whole of sophia: everything in ontology and epistemology and ethics – what there is, what we know of what there is, and what we should do about it. As is clear from this book, Parfit’s achievement is to have avoided the strange places into which philosophers sometimes wander with age: the attic of incomprehensibility; the pasture of the history of philosophy; or the hilltop on which A. How To Install Winword Executive. C.
Grayling has constructed that most remarkable of follies, his eminently satirisable Good Book. Parfit here has abjured Grayling’s model of Biblical verse.
Maya 2014 Xforce Keygen 64. He instead gives us argument, and plenty of it. In On What Matters he has done something I hope I am not alone in considering a great achievement: he has created a vast structure of philosophical argument which is remarkable for its clarity, persistence and charm.
Major Arguments There are two major lines of argument in On What Matters. The first concerns the attempt to establish a universal theory of morality. This part of the book is likely to attract the most detailed criticism, since Parfit is convinced that he has reconciled almost every theory of morality – Bentham’s, Kant’s, Scanlon’s – into what he calls a ‘Triple Theory’. Parfit’s claim is that the difference between Kantians (duty ethicists) and Benthamites (utilitarians) is not fundamental. This is revolutionary, if true. Even if not true, it is to be welcomed as an attempt to get beyond endless discussions about whether rules (Kant) or consequences (Bentham) are more important when estimating the value of an act.
Parfit proposes this revised Kantian categorical imperative: ‘Everyone ought to follow the principles whose universal acceptance everyone could rationally will’.